“Getting there.” My voice was thin but functional. “Thank you.”
“We need to keep moving. They’ll widen their search radius.”
He looked down at me then. There were new lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there at breakfast. He looked exhausted. He looked about how I felt.
This morning he’d told me to report through channels and let someone else handle it. He’d sat across from me at his kitchen table and made it clear that whatever I’d come to Montana for, he wasn’t offering it.
And then he’d driven to Spokane. Why? Because I was in danger? How in the world had he known that? Lucky guess?
He should buy a damned lottery ticket.
“Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Come on.”
He put his arm around me and we walked. Two blocks east, past a dry cleaner and a nail salon, to a coffee shop on a corner. He checked the interior through the window before we went in, a quick scan that took maybe two seconds and covered every corner of the room. Then he checked the street behind us. Then the cross street.
“Here’s ten dollars. Order something. Sit where you can see the door. Don’t use your phone.”
“I don’t have my phone. It’s in my bag.”
“Right.” He paused. “I’m going back for my car. It’s still parked near your building. They were watching your entrance, not the street behind the building. I’ll be in and out. Fifteen minutes at the most.”
“You’re going back there?” I wanted to say that going back toward multiple armed men was insane, that we should call the police, that we should rent a car or take a bus or a submarine or anything but him going back toward the danger.
“I’ll be okay. It shouldn’t take longer than fifteen minutes. If I’m not back in twenty, walk to the Spokane police department on Mallon Avenue. Tell them everything. Ask for a federal liaison. Tell them everything you know about Kindt. Call reporters and tell them. Hell, call everybody you know so as many people as possible have the information.”
He was trying to save my life if he didn’t make it back. “Travis?—”
“I’ll be okay. Go.” He waited until I was inside. Watched me through the window until I sat down. Then he was gone.
I ordered a coffee because that’s what he’d told me to do and because my hands needed something to hold. I sat at a table near the back with a clear sight line to the entrance and wrapped both hands around the mug and tried to make sense of the last hour.
I couldn’t.
I’d driven back this morning with the windows down and the radio off. Five hours of highway to think about fact that I’d driven to Montana, broken into a man’s house, laid out two years of work across his kitchen table, and been told to go report it to the people who’d already ignored me.
Five hours to be furious at him for dismissing me and furious at myself for going in the first place. So when I’d seen his name pop up on my phone, I’d ignored it. Then turned it off.
I hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone. Not Pratt. Not my mother. Nobody. I wanted silence and the road.
And then a hand over my mouth in my own hallway made the world turn inside out.
Travis in Spokane. The man who hadn’t left his house in three years had driven three hundred miles into a city for me.
He’d known things he shouldn’t have known. He’d known about the men before we’d seen them. He’d known my building’s layout well enough to find the service entrance.
He’d moved through that chase with a certainty that had nothing to do with panic and everything to do with training.
I sat in the coffee shop and stared at the door and the minutes passed. Two. Five. Eight. The coffee sat untouched on the table. Outside, Spokane moved at its normal pace. Cars, pedestrians, a bus pulling away from the curb. All of it ordinary.
Twelve minutes.
The door opened. A teenager with headphones. Then a woman with a stroller. Then nobody for what felt like a very long time.
Fourteen minutes.
